Tag: public health surveillance
Dr Brian McCloskey CBE is the Director of Global Health Security at Public Health England and a Senior Consulting Fellow at the Chatham House Centre for Global Health Security. In this HEART Talks he introduces the HEART Reading Pack he co-authored on public health surveillance. He explains that public health surveillance is a means to… Read more
Introduction The 2014/15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa demonstrated that there is a need to make disease surveillance more effective. This reading pack sets out key features of effective surveillance systems, challenges to building these systems in low resource settings, and some suggested approaches. It places surveillance in the wider context of health systems strengthening,… Read more
The goal of this document is to provide national health authorities, and stakeholders supporting them, with guidance for implementing or enhancing the all-hazards Early Warning and Response (EWAR) within national surveillance systems. It aims to provide direction regarding the implementation of surveillance capacities, especially Event-Based Surveillance (EBS), in order to detect and to respond rapidly… Read more
Of the 46 countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) African region (AFRO), 43 are implementing Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) guidelines to improve their abilities to detect, confirm, and respond to high priority communicable and non-communicable diseases. IDSR provides a framework for strengthening the surveillance, response, and laboratory core capacities required by the… Read more
With more than 3000 deaths since the first case was confirmed in March, 2014, the international community has recognised Ebola as a public health emergency of international concern and a clear threat to global health security. It is the subject of a high-level UN Security Council resolution, and has triggered the creation of a UN… Read more
In its 1988 report, a committee of the Institute of Medicine highlighted assessment as one of the three core functions of public health along with policy development and assurance. The committee recommended that every public health agency regularly and systematically collect, assemble, analyse, and make available information on the health of the community, including statistics… Read more